Upgraded to Fedora 14

I just did a preupgrade upgrade from Fedora 13 to Fedora 14. The only hitch is that it didn’t find enough space to download the installer ahead of time so that had to be downloaded after the the reboot. Everything went off without a hitch. My absolute cleanest upgrade ever. Dual screen worked, nothing had to be uninstalled. None of the repos had to be disabled. All my usual programs work. I haven’t tried Blender yet, that’s tomorrow. The first thing I noticed was that the OpenOffice.org icons have changed again. This is the third time, I think,since I’ve been using Linux.

New Icons in Fedora 14

Then I noticed that Empathy had new icons. I think, once I figured out what they were, that they’re very clever, but harder to figure out than the previous ones. If you look at my recent Empathy review, you see that it’s very easy to tell what’s going on at a glance. Green circles are available and red triangles are gone. There’s nothing intuitive about circles and triangles, but the colours are pretty universal. Here’s the new icon set:

Fedora 14 - Empathy status icons

Available is a heartbeat, busy is a dude on the phone, and away is an empty chair. Invisible is a ghost and Offline is a greyed-out dude. Which totally makes sense once you figure out what it is. At first I thought Away was a bug of some sort. I had to look really close at the screen to figure out what it was. Now, it’s something I’ll get used to, but I’m not really sure if it’s the best icon set.

What else is different? Liferea is no longer broken. Some time during Fedora 13, it got to where it would crash on a bunch of feeds. The only way to keep it from crashing was to launch it on the commandline. That’s good. In Evolution, today’s tasks are no longer highlighted in blue. That sucks because it made it easy to see what was to be done today. Now it’s just bold. I’m curious to see if the old ones will be red again. There’s an issue with gPodder not properly handling feeds that get new episodes. But they already know about that. I saw it on the dev mailing list. It’s also plaguing Ubuntu, so I’m not too worried. I’m sure it’ll get fixed right away.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the new version of Fedora and Gnome. Later this week I’ll be checking out the new version of KDE when I take another look at Amarok. For now I think this is probably the least bug-ridden release ever. Kudos to the engineering and release teams.